I recently upgraded my Trillian Astra 4.0 beta and when I was done, it told me to go vote in a polldaddy poll.

So I did. And then my brain does what it does so often: it locked up due to overthinking.

I actually answered without thinking at first, picking the only IM client on the list that I knew. I’ve been a Trillian user for, sheesh… a looooooong time. I’ve probably been a Trillian Pro user for 7 years, and I recently upgraded to Trillian Astra. I’ve been mighty impressed with it, I must say.

Anyway, the question got to me because… did I mention I picked the only IM client on the list that I knew? Since I’ve never used the other ones, how can I definitely say Astra was the best? (to be honest, I’ve heard of Pidgin but never seen it in use).

Sure, it’s the best for me.But I feel a little icky inside with answering because I don’t think it’s a fair question. Had the question been “Which IM client do you use?” or even “Which of these IM clients have you always been dedicated to?” it would be more clarifying.

Problem is, I’m happy with Astra and don’t even have an inkling of an urge to try something else. My buddy list is > 1000 people long, built over more than a decade of adding, tweaking and organizing. I use AOL, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, Google Talk, and JABBER. Oh, and Astra connects to Facebook. I still chat with some of the people on my list on a frequent basis, and I added them to my buddy list in 1998.

WordPress upgrade

I upgraded my blog to the latest released version of WordPress, 2.8. The upgrade itself went fine (took about 1.5 minutes), but it appears most of the plugins I happen to use cause problems.

This may make my blog slightly more unreadable than normal.

Most of them cause my dashboard to not display everything that it should. Take a look here at a before and after:

Some of the plugins make half the page disappear, like above, and others make the entire page disappear. Even others cause the plugins page to completely fail with Internal Server error 500.

I’m hoping the plugin developers take note and update their plugins.

wHAIL

Last night brought a severe thunderstorm, tornados, hail and all to our area. For most people, this is not too big of a deal, but in our case it’s a little harder to deal with. For these reasons:

My wife is still recovering from knee surgery and therefore only has one good leg to use.

My daughter had an MRI Arthogram on her ankle/foot late yesterday afternoon and was on crutches from that procedure.

We live in a double-wide, so high winds by any name usually bring a deep concern

Fortunately, we have nearby relatives in a “real” house, so that’s our place of refuge when events like this occur. We even heard the tornado sirens in the neighborhood a couple of times. Had I thought to move the family over about 10 minutes earlier than I did, I would have missed the sheets of rain and hail pelleting me as I moved them out of the house and into the car.

I was pretty thankful for the umbrella I used, which deflected most of the hail from hitting us in the heads. Most.

We came back home around 1am after everything died down and we were certain we could move without angering the skies.

Trillian Astra

Not only did I upgrade WordPress, I also upgraded my Trillian multi-protocol chat client from Trillian Pro 3.0 to Trillian Astra. Astra is the code name for trillian 4.0, and it’s been in Beta for 2+ years. I’ve been on some form of IM for more than 10 years, so I’ve collected a number of accounts. Trillian has had it’s issues in the past (for me, it’s usually be CPU-related) but has been a great sidekick for me while I go about my heroic duties in life.

So far, I’d say Astra has everything good that the old version had, and adds some very neat new features.

The interface is pretty slick, too:

Some of the new features it adds that I’m excited about is facebook updates and twitter. I like that it integrates with Google Talk a little better than before as well. It also seems faster than the old version. I went ahead and upgraded my Trillian Pro status for $10 (gets some more features). Seems more fitting for my Windows 7 system.